Pharmacognosy

[2] The word "pharmacognosy" is derived from two Greek words: φάρμακον, pharmakon (drug), and γνῶσις gnosis (knowledge) or the Latin verb cognosco (con, 'with', and gnōscō, 'know'; itself a cognate of the Greek verb γι(γ)νώσκω, gi(g)nósko, meaning 'I know, perceive'),[3] meaning 'to conceptualize' or 'to recognize'.

[4] The term "pharmacognosy" was used for the first time by the German physician Johann Adam Schmidt (1759–1809) in his published book Lehrbuch der Materia Medica in 1811, and by Anotheus Seydler in 1815, in his Analecta Pharmacognostica.

Originally—during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century—"pharmacognosy" was used to define the branch of medicine or commodity sciences (Warenkunde in German) which deals with drugs in their crude, or unprepared form.

As late as the beginning of the 20th century, the subject had developed mainly on the botanical side, being particularly concerned with the description and identification of drugs both in their whole state and in powder form.

Such branches of pharmacognosy are still of fundamental importance, particularly for botanical products (widely available as dietary supplements in the U.S. and Canada), quality control purposes, pharmacopoeial protocols and related health regulatory frameworks.

The advent of the 21st century brought a renaissance of pharmacognosy, and its conventional botanical approach has been broadened up to molecular and metabolomic levels.

It is these secondary metabolites and pigments that can have therapeutic actions in humans and which can be refined to produce drugs—examples are inulin from the roots of dahlias, quinine from the cinchona, THC and CBD from the flowers of cannabis, morphine and codeine from the poppy, and digoxin from the foxglove.

[8] Plants synthesize a variety of phytochemicals, but most are derivatives:[9] A typical protocol to isolate a pure chemical agent from natural origin is bioassay-guided fractionation, meaning step-by-step separation of extracted components based on differences in their physicochemical properties, and assessing the biological activity, followed by next round of separation and assaying.